hellsheet

Hellsheet beats again

After a year-long hiatus I'm resurrecting Hellsheet, albeit with many changes. The old Hellsheet both tried to do too much and too little. Too much in that I thought it would be possible to chronicle the New York Times. Nope; there's way too much there for any blog to cover. And the old Hellsheet was too narrow: there is a great deal of importance going on in journalism and newspapers that has nothing specific to do with the NYT.

The new Hellsheet will be more eclectic, kind of like fishing with a much wider net, on with larger holes, so that only the really big fish are brought to shore. We shall see.

It will take me some time to re-design the site. At present all the old stuff -- links, blogroll, book recommendations, even Hellsheet's subtitle specifying the NYT -- is widely inaccurate. Until further notice, ignore everything but the center-column blog posts themselves.

Boo-Boos in Paradise

I've inveighed here before about David Brooks, the Times' new house conservative op/ed columnist. I've found him to be both shallow and knee-jerk predictable. I'd never really thought about the accuracy of his statements.

But now Philadelphia Magazine writer Sasha Issenberg
hfact-checks Brooks' articles an www.phillymag.com: Boo-Boos in Paradise and finds his facts to be made up. And then she confronts Brooks with his fictions. She compares him to Jayson Blair.

Brooks is correct that columnists are given more lee-way in their writing, hyperbole is a tool of the trade. But I read the Brooks' articles and there was no indication that he was writing satire (a lame claim). He presented the statements as fact, indeed asked us to believe his analyses based on those facts. Now we find out it was all a sham.

I've said before that the selection of Brooks will turn out to be a major error for the Times. I stand by that. Brooks will weather this mini-storm and will, I'm sure, have a long career with the Times. But he's going to have to get a whole lot better to walk in the same shoes as, say, Anthony Lewis, Tom Wicker, Russell Baker or even the conservative he will replace, William Safire.

Brad DeLong: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Special Richard Cheney "Opinions About Shape of Earth Differ" Issue): Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

As even occasional readers here well know, we have a special and growing disconnect at the NYT. Simply put many of the Times' vaunted Washington and national reporters seem incapable of seeing the forest because of all the trees in the way. Or, to use a different metaphor, they cannot bring themselves to report that the emperor and his minions have no clothes.

Brad DeLong was so distressed by the distortions in Elisabeth Bumiller's 300-word piece today that he called her: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Special Richard Cheney "Opinions About Shape of Earth Differ" Issue).

DeLong's conclusion: "Her replies seemed, to put it politely, incoherent." And DeLong identifies the structural problem:

Now, of course, the important thing is that Bumiller is far from being alone: White House journalists go native, lose all sense of context, and pull their punches on administrations regularly, and on this administration much more than most. I at least have known about this problem since 1982, when William Greider published his book The Education of David Stockman and made it crystal clear just how much he had pulled his punches while he was on the daily White House covering beat. It's a structural problem, it's a serious problem, and it makes a substantial part of the morning print news useless.

Giving Neo-Classical a Little More Neo

This article,Giving Neo-Classical a Little More Neo,
about neo-classical architecture by Deborah Baldwin highlights the serendipitous delights of reading the New York Times. My wife and I have designed and built two homes and I've become an architecture junkie, especially a traditional architecture junkie.

I stumbled across the article online, then spent an hour or more searching for books and sites mentioned or hinted at in the article. I had a grand time. It's articles such as these that make the Times should an indispensable newspaper. I can't really think of another newspaper that devotes the resources to covering the arts -- and the less common arts, such as architecture -- as much as the Times.

Sure, there are specialist magazines, but they are intended for architects, not the lay reader. It's the occasional, unexpected, serendipitous article such as this that makes the Times a daily delight.

What anonymous sources?

Last week The Times announced a new policy on naming sources  -- in short that anonymous sources were presumed persona non grata (see excerpts below). The ink was not yet dry on the policy -- the ASCII was still on the screen -- when the self-immolating Elisabeth Bumiller couldn't find a single named Republican operative to say that President Bush is rarin' to campaign.White House Letter: Bush Ready and Bursting to Bring It On. The lack of an on-the-record source doesn't deter Bumiller, though: she announces that Bush is in charge of his own campaign, making all the tough decisions.

In the sanitized public parlance of journalism, articles that glowingly report that the man in charge is, in fact, in charge, are called "puff pieces." Among journalists they are more often called "blow jobs," indicating a different level of fealty.

Two things are extraordinary here: (1) how quickly the anonymous sources policy was swept aside -- ignored in letter and spirit --  and (2) Bumiller's seeming inability to find a single Republican "operative" to go on the record in a "blow job" for the President.

A couple of grafs back I said that Bumiller was "self-immolating." She got her 30 seconds of infamy just two weeks ago when on the televised NYT/CBS debate/interview of Democratic candidates she asked John Kerry "is God on our side." The clip of Bumiller's question was widely replayed (especially on Comedy Central's The Daily Show) because it highlights so perfectly what is wrong with the inanities of "gotcha" journalism.

Now, about that new Times policy,  announced on Feb. 25, on anonymous sources,: here's the text of the policy.

Some excerpts:

The use of unidentified sources is reserved for situations in which the newspaper could not otherwise print information it considers reliable and newsworthy. When we use such sources, we accept an obligation not only to convince a reader of their reliability but also to convey what we can learn of their motivation — as much as we can supply to let a reader know whether the sources have a clear point of view on the issue under discussion....

Whenever anonymity is granted, it should be the subject of energetic negotiation to arrive at phrasing that will tell the reader as much as possible about the placement and motivation of the source — in particular, whether the source has firsthand knowledge of the facts....

We will not use anonymous sourcing when sources we can name are readily available.

Now read Bumiller's piece and see if it fits the policy. And ask why it doesn't.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (New York Times Headline Edition)

UC Berkeley economist Brad De Long is one of the most prolific bloggers out there. He thinks critically, and many of his posts deal with the critical thinking lapses of the press. Today he has but a single line or two, noting the inaccuracy of a front-page headline in today's New York Times.Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (New York Times Headline Edition).

A headline from the New York Times:

Job Data Provides Ammunition for Two Sides in Presidential Race

And, of course, the headline is a false description of the article. Nowhere in the article is there any hint that recent jobs data has provided George W. Bush's side with any ammunition.

The Decembrist: The Poverty of David Brooks

Mark Schmitt, a very smart economist and former government apparatchik, is yet another critic astounded by the embarrassingly poor quality of David Brooks' thinking. The Decembrist: The Poverty of David Brooks.

I've beaten up on Brooks a bit, but Schmitt does a better job of it. His blog is also consistently entertaining and analytical.

David Brooks: A Time to Dance, and Mourn

Op/ed columnist David Brooks has an extraordinarily moving piece today, A Time to Dance, and Mourn, about Jewish history and his son's bar mitzvah.

It's a great read, and Brooks' sensitivity makes even more perplexing his work at the Times to date, which has largely consisted of pedestrian recitals of Republican platitudes. Indeed, it's hard to read Brooks really fine prose today and wonder how in the world he can reconcile his obvious identification with victims with his rote approval of the modern-day destroyers of individual liberty, the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress.

Today's piece gives us hope that Brooks can mature and change.

Treasury Department Is Warning Publishers of the Perils of Criminal Editing of the Enemy

As if you needed any more documentation that the United States is being ruled by a claque of nutters, the Bush Administration has now put commas, periods and the insidious quotation marks on the list of "trading with the enemy" prohibited goods. I kid you not.Treasury Department Is Warning Publishers of the Perils of Criminal Editing of the Enemy

Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace "inappropriate words," according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months.

Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. To the baffled dismay of publishers, editors and translators who have been briefed about the policy, only publication of "camera-ready copies of manuscripts" is allowed.

The Treasury letters concerned Iran. But the logic, experts said, would seem to extend to Cuba, Libya, North Korea and other nations with which most trade is banned without a government license.

Funny, my copy of the First Amendment -- admittedly an unshredded copy -- says nothing about restricting publishing to "camera ready copy."

All of this would be funny if it weren't so ominous.

From the Daily Howler

The Daily Howler is a wonderful site. Improv comic provides deft analysis of media stories, typically skewering inept reporters. The NYT media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, who repeated lies about John Kerry, gets dumped on here. [Bottom of the page].